Bill and Ted Threequel Gets a Director

Not to be outdone by all the wacky on-again off-again news about the Jim Carrey-Jeff Daniels sequel to Dumb and Dumber, Vulture is now saying that the planned third movie starring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter reprising their roles as the time-traveling “Bill and Ted” is moving forward and that Galaxy Quest director Dean Parisot will helm that movie.

Since helming Galaxy Quest, Parisot has mainly been directing television as well as the remake of Fun with Dick and Jane starring Jim Carrey and Teá Leoni, but he’s also currently directing the star-studded action sequel RED 2 for Summit Entertainment.

There have been rumblings about a new Bill and Ted project for a couple of years, although few people took it very seriously as word got out that original Bill & Ted creators Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson were supposedly working on a new script featuring the characters.

The original movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure hit theaters in 1989, grossing $40.5 million and leading to the sequel Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey two years later, which made slightly less.

This planned threequel would take a similar approach as Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset or Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions by revisiting Reeves’ Ted Theodore Logan and Winters’ Bill S. Preston, Esq. in the current day to see what they’ve been up to decades after their earlier adventures. Maybe we’ll even find out if their band “Wyld Stallyns” is still together 23 years later.

Solomon and Matheson are looking to make this threequel as a lower-budget studio movie, but while they figure out the financing, Parisot will finish RED 2 while Solomon and Matheson finish their Lionsgate horror-comedy Rapturepalooza starring Anna Kendrick and John Francis Daley as two teens who face the apocalypse while trying to defeat the Antichrist.

Incidentally, we will have an interview with Keanu Reeves for his new doc Side to Side next week, but we didn’t ask about “Bill and Ted” because… why would we ask a nearly-50-year-old actor about a role he played when he was 25? Live and learn.